As many of you may know, I attend a lot of conferences, but typically as a speaker. Last week, I was a conference attendee, and was a bit disappointed by the experience. (And I wasn't the only one, as I found out during lunch on the second day.) I'm obviously spoiled from attending the WritersUA Conference for the last 11 years ;-).

1. Fix the typos. I received a booklet that described all sessions and exhibitors. Typos were rampant (the one I loved was an exhibitor's description where their name was mistyped). And every PowerPoint presentation had at least one typo or grammar issue. Granted, this wasn't a "technical communication" conference...but really, typos matter.
2. Presentation descriptions should match the actual presentation. I attended six sessions over the two days, and only one matched the description. In one instance, I attended a Part II of a session, because I was already familiar with what was supposed to be discussed in Part I. Unfortunately, Part II ended up being a recap of Part I, but without the demos (which was what I was really interested in). (When I said something to one of the presenters, I was told that it did't matter. Uh, yeah, it does.)
3. Don't change the slides! None of the slides that were displayed on the overhead matched what I was given for reference. Extra slides were added. Information was added to or removed from slides. As a speaker, I know it's tough to create the decks in advance. I also know that late-breaking news may require changes (this is something that I run into a lot, mostly because of the subjects I talk about). But the changes I saw were not made because of late-breaking news...they were made because the presenter re-read the slides and wanted to modify the information.
4. Sales presentations have no place in conference sessions. Well, maybe that's too strong. If I know I'm attending a sales presentation, that's one thing. But two of the six sessions that I attended were sales presentations on why I should use Microsoft SharePoint (in one case, the previous version). If the session description had reflected what the session was actually about, I would have gone to a different session.

There was one bright spot. The conference was "paperless", which was really cool. All attendees received a 1Gb USB drive (branded, of course, but that's fine) in their badge holder that contained copies of almost all of the presentations. If you brought a laptop, you could follow along, and if you didn't, they provided printers where you could print out just the sessions you were going to attend. (OK, so I guess it wasn't totally paperless ;-).)

When I checked in, I received three handouts: a slim booklet that contained all of the descriptions, a coil-bound notebook that also contained the schedule for the two days, and a small exhibitor's map (that also included the schedule) which fit easily in a back pocket.

And to go along with the "paperless" conference, they used an online survey for evaluations. The email with the link was waiting when I logged on the night that the conference ended.

Unfortunately, I don't have any tips for attendees who end up at a similar conference. Maybe if I go again next year...